“The pursuit ship didn’t have no crew aboard, it was just Del Azarchel’s second emulation, an Astro-Exarchel, and a passel of teleoperated tools. You’re thinking Rania might have bought the farm during whatever shoot-out banged when they butted heads?
Sir Guiden said, “Liege, are you trying to be obscure? Farm?”
“Sorry. You think Rania died? No fear of that!”
Sir Guiden said, “How not?”
“I know Blackie. He don’t think this big. Oh, this is her work, all right.” Montrose threw back his head and laughed. “What a gal! Did I tell you she’s mine?”
Brother Roger said diffidently, “Honored—if you intuit the meaning of this anomaly, I would be grateful if—”
“It’s eight thousand five hundred years until the Hyades Armada arrives here. Not much time. What is the biggest block to our being able to fight them when they come? We’re too small, too weak, too stupid. What is the main thing you need to get smarts? I don’t mean one man, I mean on a large-scale, bigger-than-worlds, multiple-centuries sort of deal. Library smarts; datasphere smarts. What’s it take? Energy. It takes fuel to calculate. Fuel to think. Now, the whole damn and plague-ridden universe is made out of energy, but not in a form ready to use. I was going crazy trying to figure out how many expeditions we could make to the Diamond Star for contraterrene, how much fuel is lost in transport, how many ships, considering that a ship can tow only about as much fuel as you might like to use for a round-trip, and not too much over.”
Brother Roger said, “Honored, I don’t follow you.”
“Rania blasted the Diamond Star out of its orbit around the galactic core, and is bringing the Diamond Star here. It is a dwarf star holding a ten-decillion-carat diamond made of antimatter, and if she parks it in an orbit inside our heliopause, where the interstellar medium is thin, we can go mine it in a reasonable time. How about the antimatter source is thirteen light-hours away rather than fifty light-years? How are our chances against the Dominion of the Hyades then?”
“But, Honored—”
“Please stop calling me that. The only titles I ever earned were ‘Doctor’ and ‘Esquire’ and ‘Lance-Corporal,’ and I am only qualified for one and a half of them. So call me Menelaus. If I scare ya, you can call me Doctor Montrose.”
“Doctor—”
“So I scare ya?”
Brother Roger said, “Very much so, Doctor. After you destroyed all the cities of the world, one would be foolish not to—”
“Wait. What the pox?”
Just at that moment, the clouds underfoot parted, and the sun shining on the surface of the water sent a dazzle into the cabin. Montrose turned, squinted, blinked, and something in the back of his mind, between one blink and the next, ran some rapid calculations on the afterimage of what he had just seen.
He stepped over the window. “Anyone here got a spyglass?”
Sir Guiden said, “He means a snooper.”
The willowy woman, Tessa said, “He means hunger silk. It absorbs photons as well as proteins.”
With this, Tessa stepped over to the window and threw a tail of her writhing garment across the glass. The blue gray material stuck as if magnetized, and the surface bubbled slightly. The disk of vacuum trapped beneath formed a lens, and suddenly the fabric seemed to become like a library cloth, because a clear image appeared in it of what Menelaus had seen in the distance.
It was a flotilla of airships, by scores and hundreds, drifting idly across the face of the waters, or brushing the surface. Long banners, like the lines trailing a fishing boat, hung from the airships and swept through the water. Every now and again one of the airships would turn and dive like a pelican, splash-down, and become a submarine, darting like a shark. One such airship he saw dived into a school of fish, and when it rose, the hull was dotted with sleek bodies that seemed to be glued or held against the surface. The fish melted, and their bodily fluids and guts streamed for a moment against the gray fabric of the airship, and then those streaks too were absorbed.
In the distance was shoreline, and trees beyond. There were airships here as well, trailing long fabric trains behind them as they drifted. Where the cloth passed, the trees were stripped of bark and buds. Any birds passing near were slashed out of the air by the serpentines, and the blue gray trails of fabric turned the bodies into stains of blood and absorbed them.
Menelaus, now that they were above the cloud cover, could make an estimate of their speed, and was astonished. “What is your propulsion?”
The woodwind voice of the ship answered, “Admired, cherished, and welcome guest, six valveless pulsejet engines aft use a nuclear hydrogen-fusion lance running along the lifting body axis to heat and expel an inert nitrogen compound propellant gathered from the surrounding atmospheric gases. The flexible lifting body material allows smooth and uninterrupted transition between heavier-than-air and lighter-than-air configurations, with partial vacuum created for lift by multiple microscopic rows along the dorsal surface. All gaseous raw materials are filtered out of the available environment by the submicropore chemical-lock system known as hunger silk, and recombined by molecular-capillary pseudochemistry in the fore nacelles. Lifting gases are in the buoyancy tanks. Carbon gas is reconfigured into diamond crystal and used for ballast. To submerge, the craft cross-sectional configuration—”
“Thanks, good answer, shut up,” said Menelaus. To himself, he muttered, “Never woulda guessed. Atomic-powered supersonic submarine-blimps…” He turned to Tessa, “So what happened to the cities?”
She smiled dreamily. “We have drugs to suppress those memories. Happiness drugs. But the ship can answer you in this as well, my adored ship, more loyal than any human lover.”
The Jesuit said, “I can answer, Doctor. The material used for starship sails included smart strands with molecular engines for the repair of micropunctures, altering permeability, absorbing laser energy, and so on. As time passed, the Exarchel discovered additional programming configurations for the molecular machinery, and a larger range of options. Your antimatter monopoly was broken once orbital sails could focus solar energy into any rectenna receiver anywhere on the planet—and, because Earth had been using your power broadcast reception for de cades, the rectennae were everywhere. The orbital sails, ah, well…”
“So what happened to the cities?”
Brother Roger said, “Many were burned like ants under a magnifying glass. Antimissile defenses are of no value against such an attack.”
“Who was fighting who?”
Brother Roger said, “The Giants were fighting the Ghosts.”
“Giants?”
Brother Roger said, “Posthumans. Artificial children with your intelligence range. It is a way to achieve posthumanity without making an Iron Ghost of your own brain, as the Scholars do. It was worked out by a scientific convocation held under His Holiness Pope Sixtus the Sixth.”
Sir Guiden said to Brother Roger, “He won’t know that name.” To Menelaus, he said, “Sir, Sixtus the Sixth was Thucydides Montrose. Research in brain-size increase was married to your Prometheus formula to create a posthuman that did not need to be emulated to be augmented. They are genetically altered before conception to grow gigantic bodies to house their correspondingly elephantine brains.”
“What about augmenting ordinary people, Guy?” asked Montrose, distracted. “Can people ramp up to posthuman intellect like I did, without going mad, like I did?”
“Not really.” Sir Guiden sounded grim. “Too many people died trying. Emulation seemed safer, but it requires specialized training and nerve implants to be able to donate a brain copy for scanning. Those with this skill were called Savants. Before the burning of the cities, most of mankind was ruled or led by counsels or collections of these Ghosts, emulations of jurists and statesmen, replaced from their Savant donors every three years.”